N THIS PAPER
I propose to examine our current needs for editions of Don Quixote,
comment briefly on the extent to existing editions satisfy these needs, and
discuss what direction work in this area should take.
I begin with the following premises. First,
textual science to call it criticism is a bit misleading is,
like linguistics, international in its fundamentals, however national its
application. While the myriad small decisions in editing treatment
of spelling details, accidentals, emendations based on knowledge of the language
or of the author are unique to each language's literature, the basic
procedures and the major steps in the editorial process are universal. Since
at present the leaders in textual scholarship are those working

* A paper delivered
before the Cervantes Society of America, December 29, 1982, and previously
at the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference, October 8, 1982.
Without implying that they agree with the views expressed here, I would like
to thank E. C. Riley, John J. Allen, Keith Whinnom, and Tom Lathrop for reading
a draft of this paper and making helpful suggestions; I would especially
like to thank Allen and Lathrop, without whose encouragement this paper would
not have been written.
[For two corrections to this article see
Daniel Eisenberg Corrects
Cervantes3.2 (1983): 160.
-FJ]

3

4

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

on English and American literature, I am going to draw on them later for
perspective and to make suggestions about editing.
My second premise is that a bad edition is
worse than none, and our choices should be to edit rigorously, or not to
edit. A bad edition is like a false indulgence: not only does it take the
purchaser's money under a false pretense, it gives him a false sense of security,
and he will not take the truly necessary steps to meet his spiritual or editorial
needs. A bad edition, in short, makes a good edition less likely and harder
to publish.1
Finally, my remarks are addressed to Americans,
or at most to all those whose native language is English. I do not feel competent
to assess the requirements for Quixote texts in another culture, and
I think examining our own needs is a valid task for the Cervantes Society
of America. This approach, I believe, clarifies some points.
Having set forth these premises, I would like
to examine some myths about Quixote editions.
The first of these is that the establishment
of the text of Don Quixote is exceptionally complicated and difficult,
and perhaps there is another myth behind this one, namely, that the text
of Don Quixote is quite corrupt. In fact it is not particularly corrupt,
and is difficult to edit only because it is long, and because Cervantes'
ideas and language are sophisticated. Compared with the problems of many
other authors, Spanish as well as foreign, Don Quixote is straightforward.
Shakespeare, for example, is a nightmare.2
Shakespeare scholars still do not know whether Hamlet should say Oh,
that this too, too, solid flesh should melt, or too, too sullied
flesh. We have little of this with Cervantes. To find the true texts
of Calderón one must penetrate

1 See
the harsh words of Fredson Bowers, Scholarship and Editing,
PBSA, 70 (1976), 161-88, at pp. 162-63.2 The field is
so chaotic that there is not even a full overview of its current state. Fredson
Bowers, in The New Textual Criticism of Shakespeare, in his
Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge: University Press, 1966;
first ed. 1959), pp. 66-116, presents the type of problems involved. There
are two bibliographies of Shakespearean textual criticism: Trevor Howard-Hill,
Shakespearean Bibliography and Textual Criticism: A Bibliography (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971), and James C. McManaway, A Selective Bibliography
of Shakespeare: Editions, Textual Studies, Commentary (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1975). Charlton
Hinman, in Shakespearian Textual Studies: Seven More Years,
Shakespeare 1971. Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, Vancouver,
August 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson
[p. 5] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1971), pp. 37-49, surveys some recent contributions. For a non-technical
introduction to the field, see Eleanor Prosser, Shakespeare's Anonymous
Editors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981).

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

5

a maze of fakes, forgeries, authorial revisions, sueltas, and last
but not least, Mr. Vera Tassis.3 Alfonso el
Sabio required an analysis of the variants of different
manuscripts,4and Lazarillo,
whose first two editions are lost,5 has more
recently required the same procedure of its
editions,6 even to decide which text to take
as copytext. In the case of Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, which I have
investigated in detail,7 an essential manuscript
is missing, and without it we can only do a makeshift edition with much less
authority.8 And of
Celestina,9 which exists in dramatically
different forms, the validity10 and
authorship11 of which are currently intensely
debated, más vale no hablar.
In the case of Don Quixote all the
potentially relevant forms of the text have already been collected. Although
new manuscripts, like that

containing works of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de
Flores,12 do come to light, in the case of
Cervantes this possibility is remote. There is already a well-founded consensus
about the copytexts, the Cuesta principes, as we know, thanks to much
work already done, that save for the well-known passages in the second Cuesta
edition of Part I (which I will call the second edition), the
first editions are closer than any others to what Cervantes wrote. The number
of extant copies of these first editions Part I and Part Il is
blessedly limited.13 I had hoped to be able
to give you an exact figure, but I have found that determining the number
of extant copies, especially

12 Keith
Whinnom, Dos opúsculos isabelinos: La coronación de
la señora Gracisla (BN MS. 22020) y Nicolás
Núñez, Carcel de amor, Exeter Hispanic Texts,
22 (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1979), pp. v-xii.13 The smaller
the number of texts, the less tedious, though not necessarily less thoughtful,
is the work of the textual scholar. The simplest cases are those in which
there survives only a single copy of a single text, like La loçana
andaluza.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

7

of the confusing Part I, is a little project in itself. Robert Flores says,
without offering any explanation, that all the copies of Part
I share a certain characteristic which I will refer to
later;14 I wish he had shared with us how
many copies there are, and where they are located. Be this as it may, there
are only around 15 of Part I, less of Part II, compared with about 100 of
Shakespeare's first folio, every one of which has been examined by a textual
scholar. We have at our disposal a great amount of help in the form of
vocabularies, concordances, indexes,15 and
scholarship about Cervantes' language, ideas, knowledge, and so on. With
such a state of affairs, we may well wonder why a definitive edition of the
most famous author of the Spanish language has never been published.
One obvious reason, which brings me to a second
myth, is that such an edition would not necessarily be attractive to a publisher.
It would be slow as well as expensive to publish accuracy has its
price and would not necessarily sell as well as many might imagine,
for it would be competing with many cheaper editions, some with distinguished
names attached to them. In the long run, of course, such an edition would
surely be profitable, but the investment in publishing it, to say nothing
of the costs of producing the edition in the first place, would be substantial.
Most Spanish publishers already have an edition of Don Quixote in
their catalogues, and any new edition, especially a much better one, is a
threat to the investment in those copies.
I do not mean to imply that publishers are
petty, and that one or more would not jump at the chance to publish a
Quixote edition which would eventually be widely accepted by scholars.
I think some would publish it even at a loss, and subsidies for preparing
and publishing such an edition should be available if the case for them is
clearly and convincingly made. But this, plus the perception that existing
editions are meeting needs adequately they do sell copies explains
why the initiative has not come from the publishing industry.

14The
Compositors of the First and Second Madrid Editions of Don Quixote
Part I (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975),
p. 18. He also makes this statement in The Compositors of the First
Edition of Don Quixote, Part II, JHP, 6 (1981), 3-44,
at p. 21.15 The most
helpful index to Don Quixote is that which, along with a prologue
of Américo Castro, accompanies the Sepan Cuántos
edition of the Mexican Porrúa.

8

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

I have been speaking about an edition,
and deliberately so, but in fact this is the third and final myth I would
like to comment on. Succinctly stated, this is the myth that one glorious
edition of Don Quixote can meet all our needs. I doubt this is true
for Spain; it is certainly not true for the United States. Our needs are
too diverse, and I propose that future editors consider
specialization.16
I have divided into three categories the potential
American users and purchasers of a Quixote edition. First, there are
STUDENTS and casual readers who want to read the work in Spanish,
but whose linguistic skills and knowledge of Cervantes' culture are limited.
These readers need a totally modernized edition of an accurate text, without
textual notes. They do need abundant explanatory
notes.17They need to be told,
looking at the first chapter for examples, what salpicón and
duelos y quebrantos were, what tantum pellis et ossa fuit means,
that Bucephalus and Babieca were the horses of Alexander the Great and the
Cid respectively, even who Roland was, and so on. They do not need to know
anything about the Caballero de la Ardiente Espada other than that he was
the protagonist of a romance of chivalry by Feliciano de Silva, and no more
about Silva than that he was a prolific author of such works.
Users of this edition would not need extensive
references to scholarship. They do need an introductory essay placing the
work in its literary context, and pointing out its major themes. This
introduction might well include a section on How to Read Don
Quijote, calling attention, among other things, to the most important
sections, an important piece of guidance for the many who are not going to
read the work in its entirety. It should also include a discussion of Cervantes'
language, and the edition could very usefully be graced with a vocabulary.

16 I
would not want the criteria proposed here to be taken as necessarily appropriate
for the edition of texts other than Don Quixote. In deciding on the
criteria proposed the following factors were considered: that no manuscripts
of Don Quixote survive, that Cervantes was a linguistically sophisticated
writer, that there already exist many editions of Don Quixote, including
facsimiles, that there is a regular and relatively large demand for copies,
and that there is great diversity in readers' preparation, approach, and
goals. To the extent that these factors would not apply to other texts, the
criteria might best be different.17 One model
is supplied by a modest work, Justo Caballero's Guía-diccionario
del Quijote (Mexico: España Errante, 1970), whose
annotations are intended to accompany any edition of the text.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

9

It would be a great convenience if the lines
of this edition were numbered. And finally, two hidden sources of the popularity
of Riquer's Juventud edition should be adopted: an index, and descriptive
running heads.
No such edition, of course, exists. In fact,
while Spanish-language editions of common text works have been published
for American or British university use, there has never been such an edition
of any but fragments of Don Quixote. Such an edition would surely
sell very well.
A second category of readers, with different
needs consists of SCHOLARS, whether they be professors or
lay Hispanists. Here some of our needs are met by existing editions.
Such readers do not need to be told who Babieca,
Bucephalus, or Roland were. They do need to be told that the opening sentence
of the novel has been the subject of much scholarship, that in naming the
University of Sigüenza Cervantes was being funny, and the overtones
of the name Aldonça Lorenço.
How should the accidentals (spelling and
punctuation) of such an edition be handled? Although each textual feature
must be considered separately, as general principles I suggest the conservation
of the significant accidental features of the text, and a bias against
modernization, on which topic the English and American scholars are quite
definite.18 I believe this especially important
because Cervantes phonetics (and those of his characters) are all but
unstudied,19 and we are not even sure of
what modernization costs us.

18
Elizabethan editors save themselves a vast deal of trouble and risk
by adhering to the original spelling and punctuation (J. Dover Wilson,
quoted by R. C. Bald, Editorial Problems  A Preliminary
Survey, Studies in Bibliography, 3 [1950-51], 3-17; I have used
the reprint in Art and Error: Modern Textual Editing, ed. Ronald Gottesman
and Scott Bennett [Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970],
pp. 37-53, at p. 42). In the discussion which follows I have kept in mind
the questions on modernization posed by Peter L. Schillingsburg, Critical
Editing and the Center for Scholarly Editions, Scholarly
Publishing, 9 (1977), 31-40, at pp. 34-35.19 Francisco
Rodríguez Marín studies La x de
Quixote in an appendix to his nueva edición
crítica (Madrid: Atlas, 1947-49), and John Jay Allen comments
on this question in the introduction to his edition, Letras Hispánicas,
100-01 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1977), I, 28-29. The valuable information
offered by Miguel Romera-Navarro, Autógrafos cervantinos,
University of Texas Hispanic Studies, 4 (Austin: University of Texas, 1954),
has not been given sufficient attention.

10

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

It is, however, difficult to reach any consensus
about what the significant accidental features of the text are,
and such evaluation may be ultimately subjective. We can agree, however,
that u / v can not possibly have any phonetic or etymological significance,
and can be modernized for the reader's comfort; I see no purpose that is
served by making a reader, even a scholar, read tuuo and
vuo. The same is true of i / j and i / y, and of
/ s.
As Amado Alonso said of u / v, these are dos dibujos de una sola
letra.20
Similarly, I can not see how anything authorial
is distorted by using modern accentuation, or through the use of the dieresis
(¨) over u. These are transparent elaborations on, rather
than distortions of, the text's orthography. In Cervantes' autographs these
signs are not found at all (Romera-Navarro, p. 22); the accents of Cuesta's
texts are phonetic, even if not according to the current system. It is true
that Golden Age word stress sometimes differed from that of the present,
in which case, of course, Golden Age practice should be
followed,21 and the accentuation of invented
proper names (Alfefliquén,
Trifaldí22) is sometimes no more than
guesswork, but I believe that the editor is the person to deal with these
questions, not every reader. The use of an accent on interrogatives is less
intrusive than the inverted question mark, favored by James
Crosby.23
There are two further modernizations which
are less sound theoretically, but which I believe desirable: the division
into paragraphs, and the silent resolution of abbreviations. An edition with
no paragraphs will simply not be used; I have had the task of reading Golden
Age novels without paragraphing, and feel that the lack of paragraph divisions
was much an annoyance, and my comprehension increased insignificantly. The
abbreviations were the textual feature most freely altered by compositors;
their meaning is rarely ambiguous, and

20De
la pronunciación medieval a la moderna en español, ultimado
y dispuesto pana la imprenta por Rafael Lapesa, I (Madrid: Credos, 1955),
p. 15.21 The standard
work on the topic is Felipe Robles Dégano, Ortología
clásica de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Tabarés, 1905).22 I believe
that this word is correctly accented as an agudo, with the Arabic
-í ending, frequently found in Cervantes (borceguí, maravedí,
etc.), and not the Italian or Catalan -i, found only rarely. [See
Daniel Eisenberg Corrects,
Cervantes3.2 (1983): 160.
-FJ]23Política de Dios, govierno de Christo (Madrid: Castalia, 1966),
p. 20. This is the most rigorous edition of any seventeenth-century Spanish
text from a printed source; it was reviewed favorably by E. M. Wilson,
HR, 37 (1969), 420-23.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

11

this point is best addressed by the editor. The more acceptable of the other
alternatives would be conservation of the abbreviations (tãbien),
not their irritating resolution with italics (tanbien), which call
attention to something of little importance.
Beyond this, however, given our present state
of knowledge, I can see no justification for modernization. That the accidentals
have been altered by the compositors is not, in my judgment, a justification
for their modernization, nor is their irregularity grounds for regularization.
They still reflect something of Cervantes' practice, even if it is
not always clear just what, and the alteration was executed by Golden Age
workers, with Cervantes' manuscript before them. This would make scholars
read Aldonça and Pança, yet I do not view that
as a great hardship; it also permits them to see that Sancho said
vaziyelmo, not baciyelmo.
I would like to speak out, for the same reasons,
against modernization of capitalization and punctuation. It was Golden Age
usage to capitalize important words, such as Cavallero Andante, and
I believe the distinction between that term and the uncapitalized
cabrero worth conserving.
Golden Age punctuation has been mostly ignored.
The punctuation of such authors as
Milton24 and
Shakespeare25 has, however, been shown to
have important implications. It is indeed a revelation to read a familiar
play [of Shakespeare] for the first time in a Quarto or Folio text,
summarizes G. B. Harrison. The reader finds himself at once in the
atmosphere of the Globe . . . . The differences [in
punctuation] are slight but subtle. It is just the difference between a piece
of music as played by an amateur and by a
master.26
James Crosby has examined the punctuation of
Quevedo's Política de Dios, and found that it is based en
el ritmo retórico y en la intensidad o el término de las
pausas, rather than en la lógica y en la sintaxis
(pp. 20-21). What Crosby has observed in Quevedo's text I have observed in
Cervantes'. The punctuation is not haphazard or capricious, merely different,
and in the case of a linguistically sophisticated

author, master of prose style, it is a considerable deformation to replace
it with the system of a different age.
As this is the most innovative proposal I am
making, I would like to look at some examples of the punctuation of the Cuesta
texts. The punctuation of Don Quixote's challenge to the leonero reads
in the original:

All the recent editors supply exclamation points to these: !Ta, ta!,
and Rodríguez Marín makes the first of them ¡Ta!
¡Ta!, overemphasizing the strength of the words, which, in our
first example at least,

are entre sí. Adding exclamation points and all
the modern editions have more exclamation points than do Cuesta's takes
away from the force of those that are found, and they are found at points
well worth emphasizing. An example is when Sancho says, con voz admirativa
y grande:

Modernization of punctuation also eliminates
the ambiguous structures of Golden Age prose, which can drift from statement
to question or exclamation, or vice-versa, in the same sentence, and from
narration to direct address in the same paragraph. I do not have a good example
of the former from the Quixote, but here is one from the Espejo
de príncipes, with the original punctuation:

This sentence clearly begins as an exclamation, but by the end it isn't,
and there is no logical break for a closing exclamation point. (I solved
it, imperfectly, by adding an exclamation point, followed by comma, after
palabras.)

28 This
passage is found on pp. 258-59 of Volume III of my edition (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
1975).

14

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

Though the passages are too long to read, Don
Quixote drifts from narration to direct address in the speech of the
canon which ends Chapter 47 of Part I, and the change marked in all recent
editions, which use a sentence break, is artificial and, I believe, belated.
There are similar switches in the first speech of Don Quixote in II, 22,
and in the speech of the primo in the same chapter.
No modern edition conserves the effect of the
very logically placed colons29 (which I have
replaced with semicolons) in the following passages:

For an author with such control of the rhythms
of his prose as Cervantes had, such modernization is not only unnecessary,
but harmful.30 Anyone who can read the
Cid in old Spanish can read Don Quixote in Golden Age dress.
It may take a little bit longer, but this is not a major defect, and may
be a small virtue; those who must read quickly can read a modernized version.

29 The
colon, according to Gonzalo Correas, Ortografia kastellana (1630;
rpt. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1971), p. 91, sirve para la media
klausula.30 However,
I am not censoring correction of punctuation, when necessary. Here
are two examples for which correction would be desirable:

As already stated, these scholarly readers
need annotations explaining the more difficult words and allusions, and
references to the points which have been discussed by scholars and summaries
of many of the discussions. They also need textual notes, so that they can
determine where the editor has emended the text and every modern editor
emends the text somewhere, and rightly so. Editors, being human, make mistakes
in emendation, and if other scholars are informed of their emendations, any
curioso may verify for himself the wisdom of these changes. Textual
notes are a fundamental feature of a modern scholarly edition.
I would like to give you an example of a well-known
passage, the pasaje más oscuro del Quixote, in
which Cuesta's editions disagree and the modern editors do as well:

Cuesta's second edition reads con otras
cosas, and el que lo compuso. Schevill and Bonilla read
otras and le, in Rodríguez Marín's
text we find otras and lo, those of Allen, Riquer,
and Avalle-Arce have estas and le, the readings of
the princeps, and Murillo reads estas and lo,
so we have all possibilities represented. I will have more to say about this
passage and what I believe the correct readings to be later; the point I
would like to make now is that no edition since that of Schevill and Bonilla
tells us that Cuesta's editions disagree, and that some scholars consider
the readings of the second edition preferable; neither Rodríguez
Marín nor Murillo tells us he has emended the text. And this is the
most difficult passage of the work, about which 15 articles have been
written.31
There has only been one edition of Don
Quixote, that of Schevill and Bonilla, which had textual notes and which
attempted to preserve the orthography of the Cuesta texts; this edition is
now out of print. There has never been an edition which does not modernize

31 They
are listed in the first note to my Pero Pérez the Priest and
His Comment on Tirant lo Blanch, MLN, 88 (1973), 321-30,
now in Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age (Newark, Delaware:
Juan de la Cuesta, 1982), pp. 147-58.

16

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

punctuation. We do have several well-annotated editions available for purchase.
The annotations of Rodríguez Marín's nueva edición
crítica retain their value, and they are accompanied by an index.
Of the new, less expensive editions, the most extensively annotated is that
of Murillo.
Finally, we most certainly need, though in
my opinion less urgently than the preceding editions, a
DEFINITIVE edition of Cervantes' text, as definitive as the
state of the art can make it,32 an edition
for cervantistas, to be consulted rather than read, an edition which
no one will buy who does not already own at least one, and perhaps several,
other editions. This edition would eventually be the source for the text
of editions of the types outlined above, and would be used for linguistic
study.
This edition should have no systematic
modernization whatsoever, and not a letter would be changed without a record
of that change being included in the edition. In fact, the most important
feature of this edition would be its textual apparatus; it should include,
among other items, the variants of all of Cuesta's editions. Since it would
not be intended for reading, and explanatory annotations would be available
elsewhere, explanatory notes should be dispensed with. This would make it
a more lasting, as well as less expensive, edition.
The first step in the production of such an
edition is to secure funding for its preparation. It can not, and should
not, be prepared on a volunteer basis, and even at a very high price, contrary
to the purpose of the edition, future royalties could not pay the costs.
While some scholars would surely be willing to do some of the work without
compensation, motivated by their interest in a definitive edition of Don
Quixote, it would not be a wise use of the time of these highly-trained
people; much of the work would be quite tedious, and could be done by persons
without advanced training in Spanish literature.
The second step in producing such an edition
is collation of the various copies of Cuesta's principes, in order
to locate variants introduced during the printing process as the result of
simultaneous

32
Definitive is an unfortunately transitory status in textual studies,
but it is still an appropriate goal. See Shillingsburg, pp. 33-34, and the
comments of James Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino,
California: Huntington Library, 1972), pp. 171-73.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

17

proofreading, and from broken type. The evidence that makes this step a
requirement is overwhelming. There is no reason to suppose that Spanish printers
worked differently than those of other countries printing was an
international trade and the practice of English printers is well
documented.33 The fact that different copies
of Herrera's Anotaciones are not identical is stated in the book
itself;34 Rivers collated six copies of
Garcilaso's princeps, and found no two the
same,35nor are any two of twelve
copies of Obras en verso del Homero español, studied by E.
M. Wilson, the same;36previous
incomplete collation of Don Quixote has been most
worthwhile.37
How many copies need be collated? That is a
difficult question, and the authorities will not give one a definite
answer.38There is a

consensus, though, that five or six is a
minimum,39and I would suggest
that if six copies needed to be collated for Garcilaso, and each of these
was different, no less than six should be collated for Don Quixote.
Some textual scholars from outside Hispanic studies that I have consulted,
such as John Andrews of the Folger Shakespeare Library, say that if there
are only fifteen, we ought to collate them all and have done with
it.40
Once such collation has been done a modest
but very attractive project is easily realized, one which I recommend to
the Society: the publication of a more perfect facsimile. The problem with
existing facsimiles is that they only reproduce one copy (most do not even
tell us which), and since the copies differ, no single copy of Cuesta's editions
represents even Cuesta's intentions. On the basis of the evidence collected
from collation it is possible to choose, from different copies, the best
state of each page, and by assembling these one can prepare a
reproduction of Cuesta's editions as he himself would have produced
them, were he not constrained by limitations of time and money. This has
been done in the case of Shakespeare, producing a definitive facsimile of
the first folio, the Norton facsimile, and the procedure used is described
in a lecture by Charlton Hinman (cited in note 33).
I suggest to the Society, then, as a first step in producing a definitive
edition of Don Quixote, the preparation and publication of a definitive
facsimile.41
Such a useful tool would not, of course, be
a substitute for an edition, since Cuesta's editions, like all those of the
period, have

39 Bowers,
Textual Criticism, p. 33, n. 20. See also Thorpe, pp. 70-71 and
75.40 This is not
such an impossible task as it might seem; the best method is to do the Roman
copy-shop in reverse, with one reader and a room full of graduate student
checkers. Both in terms of manhours and money, it is on the same scale as
other editorial projects funded by the National Endowment for the
Humanities.41 A facsimile
also needs to be carefully supervised; see Ernest W. Sullivan,
Bibliography and Facsimile Editions, PBSA, 72 (1978),
327-29 (and those who turn to this article would do well to also read the
preceding one, by S. W. Reid, Definitive Editions and
Photocomposition, pp. 321- 26). A. David Kossoff has told me that he
witnessed the retouching of what was actually punctuation during
the production of one of A. Pérez Gómez's facsimiles. On the
value of facsimiles, see the comments and references of Crosby, p. 21.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

19

numerous errors of different sorts. Here we have the heart of the editing
process: the application of the editor's judgment and knowledge to the data
assembled.
I will have some examples of this process shortly,
but I would like, first, to call your attention to the Center for Scholarly
Editions, sponsored by the Modern Language Association. This center, successor
to the earlier Center for Editions of American Authors, has two main functions:
the dispensing of advice, and the conferring of its emblem, An Approved
Text, to deserving editions. The Center has no prescribed rules to
follow, although every edition must include a statement or essay describing
the history of the texts . . . and defending the rationale for
any emendation of [the] copy-text, and a report of variant readings.
The Center wishes editors to explore the literature on editing, become
acquainted with the issues, follow the arguments, and sort out what makes
sense, as a scholar would do in approaching any other subject; however,
it does believe that punctuation, spelling, and capitalization have
an important bearing on the meaning and implications of written and printed
texts; it believes that an author's practice in these matters is of interest
in its own right and worth trying to establish. The Center also will
insist on rigorous proofreading.42
The emblem An Approved Text, whose
commercial significance will be considerable, is a reasonable goal for any
editor who wishes to produce a definitive edition; I recommend to the Cervantes
Society editors that they seek it.
At this point I think I should make some remarks
on the topic of compositorial analysis and its relation to Cervantes'
accidentals. I am going to pause to make these remarks because some of us,
including myself, have felt intimidated by the studies that have been published
on this topic. Compositorial analysis is only one of the tools available
to the editor. It is not, and was never intended to be, a substitute for
good judgment. It was developed as a means of handling substantive i.e.,
major variants, not accidentals.

42 These
quotations are from their Introductory Statement, published in
PMLA, 92 (1977), 583-97, which includes an extensive narrative
bibliography on editing; see also the article of Shillingsburg cited in n.
18. For orientation about their standards for proofreading,
see the Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures of the Center
for Editions of American Authors, revised edition (New York: Modern Language
Association, 1972). (Proofreading can be combined with collation, and two
chores made one.)

20

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

Flores' published goal is to identify the
characteristics of spelling and punctuation of Cuesta's compositors, subtract
these from his texts, and thereby to arrive at Cervantes' manuscript, or
as Flores puts it, to recover Cervantes' orthography
(The Need for a Scholarly, Modernized
Edition of Cervantes' Works, Cervantes,
2 [1982]. 69-87, at p. 78; see also
Compositors, pp. 87-89). To do such completely is impossible. It is
theoretically impossible. Such has never been done for any author, and it
certainly can not be done with Cervantes.
I am going to give you an example to illustrate
why it is impossible. It is an example which, for simplicity, I am making
up, but it is faithful in spirit to the problems involved. Let us assume
that the number of commas found in the first edition of Part II varies, and
let us further assume that it varies consistently by forms, so that we can
identify two of the four compositors who worked on the
edition43 as ones with higher proportions
of punctuation than the others. The question then is, did two of them add
commas, or did the other two subtract them?
This is a question which can be answered, at
least in theory. It is answered by a basic procedure for this type of study:
analyzing the work of the same compositors in setting another text, one for
which there is a control, a text which they worked from and which can be
examined. Although it would be worth checking, I doubt that any MS the Cuesta
compositors used survives, since dead manuscripts were regularly recycled,
but many of his publications were set from printed sources. In 1616, for
example, Cuesta published an edition, of Josephus' Jewish War, a lengthy
text on which at least some, and perhaps all, of his 1615 compositors worked.
Josephus' text was certainly set from one of the two previous editions of
that translation, and it would not be a difficult task to determine which.
By doing a compositorial analysis of Cuesta's edition of Josephus one could,
having identified the compositors and matched them with the compositors of
Don Quixote, Part II, compare the work of the latter with a control
text, and determine how each of them handled commas.
Let us further assume that this enormous piece
of work has been done, and we have verified that the two compositors with
many commas in Cervantes' text added commas to the text of Josephus; it

would then be a safe conclusion that they added commas to the text of Cervantes,
and typesetters certainly did this sort of thing. So now we have confirmed
that there are indeed too many commas in a portion of Don Quixote.
To remove the excessive punctuation, however, would require us to identify
which commas are the work of the compositors, and which are Cervantine.
There is no way to do this. By analyzing the syntactic structures of the
text this would have to be a manual analysis, incidentally; there is
no program to do it on a computer one might be able to determine that
with certain syntactical structures the one set of compositors consistently
added punctuation. But Spanish syntactical structures, especially of this
period, are too diverse for this to be done with every type of structure.
Let us make the same point another way.
Compositorial analysis is a statistical method, and statistics depend on
quantities of examples. It's one thing to take a word which appears fifty
times in the text; it's quite a different thing with a word that occurs only
five times. The ultimate case is the hapax legomenon, the word that
an author uses only once, and with such a word compositorial analysis breaks
down completely.
Flores' own published data demonstrate that
one cannot generalize from how the compositors handled frequent words to
how they handled less frequent words. The compositors themselves are not
consistent. The same compositor (C) who spelled barbero with
a b spelled vozes with a v and
vazia with a b, and compositor F spelled
vozes with a v and viuda with a
b. The same one (E) who does not capitalize general,
barbero, or enano does capitalize gigante
and ciudad. When we can not generalize about the treatment of
the frequent words, we certainly can't about the infrequent words.
There is a further difficulty with the laudable
goal of recovering Cervantes' orthography, and that is the assumption that
Cervantes had a consistent orthography to be recovered, which assumption
is basic to Flores' method as well as to his goals. Flores is very definite
in speaking of Cervantes' orthography. Cervantes, who was
writing at greater leisure [than the compositors] he tells us
was not likely to fluctuate aimlessly back and forth from one spelling
to the other (Compositors, p. 88). It is unlikely that
Cervantes could equally well have written trahia, traía
and traya, aora, agora and ahora, or
barbero, Barbero and baruero (p. 88). The
different spellings,

22

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

punctuation patterns, and setting habits [of Cuesta's compositors] destroyed
the uniformity of the original manuscript (Compositors,
p. 63; italics mine). (Earlier, however, Flores had admitted that it
was improbable that Cervantes's orthography would have kept constant throughout
his work [p. 17].)
Now, everything that we know about Cervantes
tells us that he was not a man who placed a high value on order, conformity,
and consistency. His life and the diversity of his writings speak eloquently
of his experimentation, his interest in novelty, his concern for the ideas
and the big picture rather than the details. The compositors'
inconsistency itself suggests struggles with an inconsistent authorial
manuscript. But we have better evidence than these inferences about his
orthography. I refer to the documents he wrote in his own hand, ten of which
were reproduced and analyzed by Miguel
Romera-Navarro.44Here is what
Romera-Navarro tells us about Cervantes' own spelling, undistorted by any
compositors: De los seis escritores clásicos con cuya escritura
estamos algo familiarizados Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina,
Quevedo, Gracián y Calderón, el menos uniforme en la
forma de la letra, en el empleo de mayúsculas y minúsculas,
en el uso de ciertas vocales y consonantes, en ligar o no ciertos vocablos,
en las contracciones y abreviaturas, en la puntuación y en el aspecto
general de su escritura, el menos uniforme, repito, el más irregular,
aun dentro de una misma página, aun firmando su nombre mismo, es
Cervantes (p. 2). Romera-Navarro also comments on Cervantes' punctuation:
Los documentos no traen un solo caso de coma, de punto y coma, de dos
puntos . . . , ni el acento, las diéresis o el guión
en la division de una palabra al fin del renglón
. . . . Jamás aparecen el paréntesis,
el subrayado, ni otro signo ortográfico auxiliar, excepto el punto,
y éste rarísimamente (p. 22).
I would like to look at only one example of
Cervantes' orthography, the most frequent example, his
signature.45Sometimes he signs
documents Miguel de cerbantes and sometimes Cerbantes.
And here is a further point: he spelled Cerbantes with a
b, and this is one of the few consistencies to be found, a strong
spelling preference, since he rarely used, in the autographs, b
for

44 In
the study cited in note 19.45 Numerous
reproductions of Cervantes' signatures to non-autograph documents are reproduced
by Luis Astrana Marín as illustrations to his Vida ejemplar y heroica
de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Madrid: Reus, 1948-58).

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

23

v (Romera-Navarro, p. 16). Yet in his books Cerbantes
is only found inside his books (the Adjunta al Parnaso, the preliminaries
of La Galatea, the description of La Galatea in Don
Quixote, I, 6), and on none of the title pages, which spell
Cervantes with a v or u. Which is to
say, the topic was not important enough for him to tell any of his publishers
to be sure to spell his name as he signed
it.46
So I believe that the theory that Cuesta wreaked
havoc on a carefully-spelled MS of Cervantes will not stand. I do not doubt
that some further progress in recovering Cervantes' accidentals is possible,
and we should welcome it. But I must also point out that it is extremely
slow and time-consuming research, and even were we to concede the possibility
of a complete recovery of Cervantes' orthography, it is not even in the
foreseeable future. As an illustration, I believe a fair one, of the utility
of compositorial analysis in questions of accidentals, I would point out
that this method has given us several very important facts, but what it has
told us about Cervantes' spelling is that he wrote some forms of the auxiliary
verb haber without the initial h, and that he wrote
Dulzinea with a z (Compositors, pp. 88-89;
compare Romera-Navarro, pp. 16-18).
These are details, just as whether he wrote
cautivo or captivo, whether or not he capitalized
cura, even a much more important case whether he
wrote vuesa merced or vuestra merced are all details.
I do not mean that they are unimportant details, or that we have any reason
not to accept emendations with open arms. But they are details all the same,
and we should keep them in perspective. They were not particularly important
to the author, either, as Flores himself tells us, when he states that Cervantes
would be hard pressed to restore his accidentals to Cuesta's texts
(Compositors, p. 89).
Having gone this far, I'm going to echar
el resto and say something in defense of Cuesta and his employees. Flores
is hard on modern editors, but he is poison on Cuesta's compositors. He spells
out in words for us their three thousand four hundred and sixty-nine
important variants (Compositors, p. 85). This is a staggering
number

46 Cervantes'
Memorial to Felipe II, the famous document on which was written
busque por acá en qué se le haga merced (reproduced
by Astrana, IV, 454), is not in his handwriting, but it was obviously produced
with great care and at Cervantes' direction, and in it, as if to avoid omitting
anything, we find his name has been spelled Miguel de çeruantes
Sahavedra.

24

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

(p. 85). The compositors had an unpardonable devil-may-care attitude
towards their copy (p. 87). They are guilty of remorseless distortion
of the authorial orthography (Need, p. 85). These compositors
took on their shoulders all the rights and none of the responsibilities
attached to proofreaders and editors (Compositors, p. 85).
These are strong words. Were Cuesta and his
employees fools?47 Of course, they weren't.
They are seen as deficient because twentieth-century standards are being
applied to their seventeenth-century labors. No recent scholar has claimed
that Cuesta's shop was any worse than those of his contemporaries; Rudolph
Schevill says: comparado con otras primeras ediciones, v. gr., las
de El Buscón, Guzmán de Alfarache y El Peregrino
en su Patria, no parece [la edición príncipe de Cuesta]
digna de tanto desprecio (I, 10 of his and Bonilla's edition). There
is evidence to support the view that Cuesta's work was better than average;
Astrana Marín called his shop una de las mejores de Madrid
(Vida, V, 610), and Francisco de Robles, who chose Cuesta to print
Don Quixote, was the librero del rey, as well as the most famous
and successful book dealer of his day. In setting the second edition of Part
I, from which Flores takes his figures on Cuesta's inaccuracy, he was, as
Flores has also shown (and Astrana stated, Vida, V. 629), working
under great time pressure. It says something, I think, that Cuesta would
subcontract work to the Imprenta Real, and the compositor of that shop who
worked on the second edition was neither more nor less careful than Cuesta's
men. And Flores himself, in another of his contradictions, says Cuesta
should not be commended or condemned on account of Don Quixote
(Compositors, p. 41).
There is some further information relevant
to our assessment of Cuesta, in a book which I found while preparing this
paper. It is the following:

47 I
have been influenced by the words of Whinnom, in The Relationship
(cited in note 10), p. 25.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

25

This book is a treatise on how to teach reading
and writing, written by a teacher (maestro) for the use of other teachers.
It first presents, like a cartilla, syllables for pronunciation exercises,
and explains how to progress from letters to syllables to words; besides
a discussion of the pronunciation of each letter, it includes an extensive
list of Latin abbreviations the novice reader might encounter, with the
resolution of each. In the section on writing there is a long discussion
of how to choose and prepare plumas, how to hold the pen in the hand,
how to place the pen and hand on the paper, and how to form the various letters
with regard to an imaginary line; a number of woodcuts illustrate these points.
Other topics discussed at some length include the correct and incorrect way
to divide words at the end of a line, the use of the hyphen, and the use
of capital letters.
This book is not an unknown one; it is found
in the standard reference works on printing, such as Palau y Dulcet, Gallardo's
Ensayo, and Juan Catalina García's Ensayo de una
tipografía complutense (Madrid, 1889). It was used by Rufino
José Cuervo48 and Amado
Alonso;49 it is found in the Conde de la
Viñaza's Biblioteca histórica de la filología
castellana, and the section on writing is discussed extensively by Emilio
Cotarelo y Mori in his Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico
de calígrafos españoles, I (Madrid, 1914), 237-43, in which
the title page and some of the writing examples are reproduced. It has, I
understand, also been used by writers on the history of education, as it
suggests that advanced students be used to help with the teaching of the
beginners (the relevant passages are reproduced by Gallardo and Cotareli).
Yet I have been unable to find it in any Cervantine bibliography or, save
a brief reference by Rodríguez Marín in his appendix on La
x de Quixote (IX, 26-27 of his edition), any mention of it in
a Cervantine context at all.
The question immediately arises: is this the
same Juan de la Cuesta, or are we dealing with a homonym? Even on the surface
it would seem that this is the same person; Juan de la Cuesta was not a common
name, and I have run across no other men so named. If a Juan de la Cuesta
had written on navigation, or veterinary medicine, or taking confession,
or if he lived in Seville or Bilbao, we might well

suspect that there were two men of the same name; to suppose that the author
of a treatise on reading and writing, head of a school located (according
to Cotarelo) in Alcalá de Henares, should come to be a Madrid printer,
through stages (Segovia and Alcalá) on which I will shortly elaborate,
is not at all implausible.
Furthermore, this Juan de la Cuesta was not
just any educator; he was a famous maestro, yet the documents concerning
Cuesta the printer make no attempt to distinguish him from a famous
homonym.50The book in question
was written por comissión de los Señores del Consejo
Real, the aprobación tells us, and the author declares:
como es muy notonio mi pupilage ha sido siempre tan grande que en esta
mi ante ha sido el más copioso de el reino y de gentes muy principales
no solamente de esta comarca sino de la corte y de hijos de criados y officiales
de su magestad muy principales y de todos los reinos de España
(fol. 62r; the passage is also found in Gallardo).
The author is also someone who has looked at
books closely, with an eye for their typography. There are frequent references
to impressores, to moldes, to different types of
letters found in books. When we add to this that the book was published by
the widow of Juan Gracián, who dealt with the same Robles family of
booksellers that Juan de la Cuesta the printer was to deal
with,51 and that no one, ancient or modern,
informs us that Cuesta the educator

50 A
number of such documents are found in Astrana Marín's Vida,
V, 609-17, and in the books of Cristóbal Pérez Pastor,
Bibliografía madrileña (Madrid, 1891-1907), Documentos
cervantinos (Madrid, 1897), and Noticias y documentos relativos a
la historia y literatura españolas, Memorias de la Real Academia
Española, 10-13 (Madrid, 1910-26). Using some of these documents is
an article tacitly employed by Seb. Dueñas Blanco in his La
edición príncipe del Quijote y la imprenta de Juan de
la Cuesta, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1933), 139-59): J. J. Morato,
La imprenta de Juan de la Cuesta, RBAM, 2 (1925), 436-41;
on the Madrigal-Cuesta press in general, see also Astrana, V, 603-15.51 BIas de Robles
contracted with Gracián for the printing of La Galatea, and
his son Francisco de Robles with Cuesta for that of Don Quixote; both
Robles describe themselves in documents as librero del rey. Francisco
de Robles is identified as Cervantes' unnamed friend of the prologue to Don
Quixote, I, by Francisco Vindel, Cervantes, Robles y Juan de la
Cuesta (Madrid, 1934).

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

27

and author and Cuesta the printer were different people, the necessary conclusion
is that they were the same person.
This interest in written communication found
in the book makes Cuesta's change of occupation plausible; a change from
the teaching to the publishing profession is certainly one many more recent
teachers have made. The identification of these two Cuestas also serves well
to explain why we have so little information about the activities of Cuesta
the printer before his appearance in Madrid in 1599, when he entered the
printing establishment of María
Rodríguez,52 widow of the printers
Pedro Madrigal and Juan Íñiguez de Lequenica. That his entrance
into the world of printing should be as employee rather than proprietor is
not surprising; a teacher of reading and writing, even a famous one, could
scarcely have accumulated the funds to enter the capital-intensive trade
of printing any other way.
Cuesta's book, according to the dates of the
preliminaries, was written by 1584, some five years before its publication.
He had entered the printing trade no later than 1588, for in that year we
find his name on a work of Horozco y Covarruvias, the Tratado de la verdadera
y falsa profecía, published in Segovia. His name is also found
on 1589 and 1591 editions of Horozco's Emblemas morales. He was presumably
called to Segovia to print these works; Segovia did not have, and was not
to have for a long time to come, a regular
press.53That a printer would
pack a press and a box of type on a wagon and travel Castile's dusty roads
is well known.
I find it inconceivable that María
Rodríguez would employ, as regente of her well-known shop and
replacement for the also well-known Íñiguez, someone who had
not printed a book in eight years. It is almost as unlikely that the expensive
equipment used to print

the Segovia books was left idle during the same
period.54 Therefore Cuesta must have been
in the printing trade during these intervening years in which his name is
not found, and he could not have been living in Segovia, where no books were
published; he was living somewhere else, and working for someone else. There
is an obvious place where he would have lived, Alcalá, and there is
an obvious employer, the publisher of his book, Juan Gracián's widow,
María Rodríguez* (Astrana, Vida,
VII, 760). Her husband had died in 1587 (see the entries for 1587 in Catalina
Garcia's Ensayo, cited on p. 25). It is reasonable to suppose that
she would have sought out someone of linguistic skill and administrative
ability to help her run the press after her husband's
death,55 yet insisted that the name of her
dead husband, whom she seems to have revered, appear on her books, as it
consistently does. It is also possible if Cuesta was working in the shop
of Juan Gracián's widow, where his book was published, that he set
his own manuscript, in which case we have something quite rare a book
typeset by its author and well worth reproducing in facsimile.
The full investigation of this book, which
should be compared with Cuesta's Segovia books and the work of Flores' typesetter
F, now identified as Cuesta himself,56 and
an assessment of its significance for editors of Cervantes is not possible
in this paper. What is clear, however, is that Cuesta was not an ignorant
fool, negligent in his handling of Cervantes' manuscript, but a thoughtful
man who had some stature as an expert on writing, spelling, and other
accidentals. In fact, the printer-publishers, in Golden Age Spain as elsewhere,

54 Richard
James Schneer, Juan de la Cuesta, First Printer of Don Quixote
de la Mancha. A Bibliographic Record of His Work (University:
University of Alabama Press, 1973), p. xi, identifies Cuesta as a hide merchant
of Segovia who printed a few books (two, according to Schneer) as a sideline.
Schneer's unspecified source must be Astrana, V. 609, n. 1, where two documents
relating to Cuesta's hide trading are indeed found. These are, however, dated
in Madrid, in 1602.55 There is
a parallel between Cuesta's entry into the Madrigal shop, which took place
the same year as the death of Rodríguez's second husband (who himself
had previously been a printer in Alcalá), and what I argue to be the
circumstances of his entry into that of Gracián's widow.56 Don
Quixote, Part II, p. 43, n. 27.* [See
Daniel Eisenberg Corrects,
Cervantes3.2 (1983): 160.
-FJ]

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

29

were men of some culture,57 not exactly the
passive recipients of authors' initiative and slaves of public taste that
they are often presumed to be. It is scarcely surprising that the people
who bought books, and most of the authors, expected a printer to act
as a sort of editor,58 and especially so
in the case of accidentals. (Modern punctuation, like standardized spelling,
is a product of printers, not authors, as any reader of medieval manuscripts
will attest.59)
Cuesta himself (typesetter F), presumably the
most experienced and the one who was setting the standard for his shop, was
the compositor who was freest in emending Cervantes' text. If he and his
employees made some spectacular goofs with the text of Don Quixote,
like yelmo de Mambrino for Sancho's deformation yelmo de
Malino, it must be said in his defense that Cervantes was very
sophisticated and atypical in his use of language, using popular speech,
foreign words, playing with words' meanings, inventing words not at
all the sort of text compositors were used to handling. The typesetters ignored
things that were unimportant, and changed, in general, the ones they were
expected to change. Modern editors do the same. It is only the definitions
of unimportant and expected that have changed.
The text as published by Cuesta, with the spelling
and punctuation added or altered, was not a bad text, then, by the standards
of

57
Gracián, for example, wrote the dedication of the translation of
Heliodorus he published; it is reproduced in the edition of Francisco López
Estrada (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1954), pp. 10-11; one of
Nucio's employees had studied at the Sorbonne (Jean Peeters-Fontainas,
Bibligraphie des impressions espagnoles des Pays-bas méridionaux
[Nieuwkoop: B. De Craaf, 1965], I, xvii). Some comments on publishers may
be found in D. W. Cruickshank, Literature and the Book
Trade in Golden-Age Spain, MLR, 73 (1978), 799-824. James M.
Wells, The Scholar Printers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1964), publishes the annotated catalogue of an exposition.58 It
had been the compositor's duty to correct or normalize the spelling,
punctuation, and capitalization (known nowadays as the accidentals)
of the manuscript (Philip Caskell, A New Introduction to
Bibliography [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], p.
110; italics mine).59 More than
by anyone else, modern punctuation was created by the great printer and scholar
Aldus Manitius. (See The Historical Development of Punctuation
Marks, pp. 182-94 of the book of Partridge cited in n.
25, supra.)

30

DANIEL EISENBERG

Cervantes

the time. If we can improve on it, in substantives or accidentals, then by
all means let us do so. But if we cannot recover Cervantes' accidentals,
and I believe that in more than a minor way we cannot, it really does not
much matter. If we somehow were to find the MS from which Don Quixote
was set, or could reconstruct it using statistical methods, we might well
find that it was as poorly punctuated as Cervantes' autographs, which have
only periods, and those rarísimamente. Would we want to
respect the punctuation of such a manuscript? We would want to conserve and
publish its readings, to be sure, but not to follow it in preparing a critical
edition.60 Cervantes would disapprove of
us if we did. Lacking evidence to the contrary, Cuesta's texts are punctuated
and, with exceptions, spelled as Cervantes wanted them to be. Note that while
Cervantes did criticize the impressores of Part I for the
ruzio error (in II, 4 and 27), he makes no comment on their handling
of accidentals.
The recent overemphasis on compositorial analysis
of Cuesta's texts would seem to reflect a desire, shared by many editors,
to reduce the establishment of a text to a series of rules that can be
mechanically applied, and a reluctance to trust one's
judgment.61 Editors fear receiving the criticism
their predecessors have received as a result of their errors in
judgment.62 However, an editor has the
obligation to use his or her judgment and correct when he or she has
a reasonable confidence that the original text is in error. To allow over-respect

60 See
the comment of Cruickshank, Textual Criticism, p. 34. Also on
this question, see James Thorpe, Watching the Ps & Qs. Editorial Treatment
of Accidentals (Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1971), especially
pp. 19-21, who observes that the editor will do best to spend only
a modest amount of his time on accidentals mainly a losing cause
and devote himself to substance (p. 21).61 See the comments
of W. W. Greg in his classic article, The Rationale of Copy-Text,
first published in Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950), 19-36; I have
used the reprint in Bibliography and Textual Criticism (note
38, supra), pp. 41-58, in which these comments
are found on p. 50. The address of A. E. Housman, The Application of
Thought to Textual Criticism, makes many of the same points, though
the context is different (first published in Proceedings of the Classical
Association, 18 [1921], 67-84; reprinted in Art and Error [note
18, supra]. pp. 1-16).62 The latest
such attack is by Santiago de los Mozos, Enmiendas injustificadas en
ediciones del Quiiote, BRAE, 54 (1974), 105-22.

3 (1983)

On Editing Don Quixote

31

for the first edition to inhibit emendation is not good
editing.63 Let me give you some examples,
all of which are from Chapter 6 of Part I.
The first of these is el que le
compuso, which the second edition, and those of some later editors,
make el que lo compuso. I believe that this change was mistaken.
Le as a masculine direct object pronoun referring to an object,
while no longer in use, is well documented in Golden Age Spanish, and there
are other examples in the text of
Cervantes.64 Why was this correction made
at all? Because this phenomenon was in flux in Golden Age Spanish, and
le was a minority usage; the compositor felt he was improving the
text.65
My second example is whether we should read
con estas or con otras cosas que todos los demás
libros deste género carecen; estas is found in the
first edition and otras in the second.
Now, no one in the last fifty years would say
that because otras is found in the second edition, it is
automatically right. But I would suggest to you that just because it is found
in the second edition, it is

not automatically wrong, either.66 The passage
clearly makes much more sense with otras; estas makes
no sense at all, and that is the key criterion. It has nothing to refer to.
Estas can not refer to the features of the Tirant the
priest has just mentioned; he is adding to them with the preposition
con. But if he says that the book has the defects he has just
pointed out, and other things, too, he is speaking in a normal way
and adding strength to his criticism of Tirant. So even if the compositors
made gratuitous emendations, judgment leads me to say that in this instance
one of them was right, and we should be appreciative.
My final example is a few lines further on,
when the examiners discover the pastoral novels in Don Quixote's library,
and the priest wants to save them from the bonfire because they are libros
de entendimiento, sin perjuizio de tercero. Here we have a possible
emendation which all the scholarly editors mention in a note, but no one
since Rodríguez Marín adopts: that the priest should say
libros de entretenimiento. What the compositors did or didn't
do is irrelevant to this point, since this emendation was not even suggested
until the eighteenth century. Yet, of course, it is not wrong just because
it is not found in any of the early editions. Examination of Cervantes' use
of the two words, and of his ideas about the function of literature, leads
me to the conclusion that this emendation is correct, just as Allen, in my
opinion, was correct when he made two other emendations found in none of
the early editions, the reading llovía for
vía in I, 4 (toda aquella tempestad de palos que
sobre él llovía), and the relocation of the ruzio
passage to a more appropriate home in I, 25.
Entendimiento was not a quality
that books had. People can entender, inanimate objects can not, and
therefore people, not books, can have entendimiento. People's
entendimiento is repeatedly mentioned in Don Quixote:

Allen proposes (I, 123, n. 23 of his edition)
that the priest intended to distinguish the pastoral novels from the romances
of chivalry, and in this he is surely correct. Yet we can explain this
distinction in terms of entretenimiento. While the priest surely shares
Cervantes' view that literature should contain some provecho to benefit
the reader, it was normal to seek in books not lessons, but entertainment.
This is what the priest is looking for, and he has just finished explaining
how, with a few exceptions, he hasn't found it in the romances of chivalry,
for which he has ojeriza (I, 48; I, 566 of Murillo's edition)
and rencor (I, 48; I, 569 of Murillo's edition). After cutting
the romances of chivalry to shreds, here, in the pastoral novels, are works
which can offer something that fulfills the purpose of fiction, that is
entretenimiento, harmless, presumably beneficial
entretenimiento. The other candidate for mouthpiece for Cervantes'
literary views, the canónigo, makes the same criticism of the
romances of chivalry.
So for these reasons, I believe that the correct
reading is libros de entretenimiento. Even though none of Cuesta's
editions have it, I am confident that Cervantes would approve of this
emendation.
Having cited these examples of judgment applied
to the process of editing, I'm going to close, and I will close in the same
way many self-help meetings do, with the serenity prayer, which is very
appropriate to the textual scholar:

God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

FLORIDA STATE
UNIVERSITY

67 All
textual quotations, save the title page cited on p. 24, have been treated
according to the principles described above as desirable for the
scholarly edition; the only other place where Don Quixote
can be read in a modern typeface but with the original consonants and punctuation
is in the excerpts reproduced by Flores in The Loss and Recovery of
Sancho's Ass in Don Quixote, Part I, MLR, 75 (1980),
301-10. 1 would be glad to receive comment on the difficulty, or lack of
it, which these unmodified accidentals caused the readers of this paper,
as I intend to follow this format in my edition of Amadís de
Grecia, to be published, Deo volente, by the Florida State University
and University of Florida Presses. To my eye and ear the results are surprising,
and pleasing.